


a footnote in your dance of days

by andbless_mybaby



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 09:03:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6278176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andbless_mybaby/pseuds/andbless_mybaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s never taken a girl to the woods. Not to do this, even if he maybe dared sometimes to think one day. (It feels like a betrayal, and that makes him angry. Katniss has Peeta now. He owes her nothing.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	a footnote in your dance of days

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written as a fill for The Porn Battle XI: white dress, strawberries, dirty hands. I fail at deadlines, obviously. Spoilers for the first book. Without my beloved badboy_fangirl , beta and confidante, I probably wouldn't have finished this. ♥
> 
> This was originally published on LJ in 2011.

The first five days of the Hunger Games come and go, although every one drags like a lead weight around Gale’s neck. Weighing him down to the ground. It’s the hottest part of the summer, just past the equinox, and no matter how early he manages to wake up to start his morning chores, he finds himself soaked in sweat long before midday.

If he’s going to be honest, his heart is not in the hunt this Sunday. He can’t afford to slack off, though. There’s a promise he’s keeping, making sure Katniss’s mother and Prim are taken care of in her absence. One less set of hands, and more mouths to feed, but his snares are as good as ever, and the heat makes the game slow. He’s already strung up one wild turkey, a little lean on the July weeds. Contemplating whether he’ll keep that one or sell it to Cray for supply money, he hears a rustle in the underbrush and freezes.

Gale thinks quickly: it’s not likely to be a Peacekeeper. Not in this weather. It could be someone else, of course, but that hasn’t happened in about four years. Very likely, it could be a deer. Excited by that possibility, he unsheathes the small knife he’s taken to carrying since Katniss left for the Capitol. There’s a small clearing about ten yards away from him, he knows, and if he can slide up quietly enough, he might be able to scare his prey into the trap waiting on the other side. He shuffles to the nearest tree ringing the clearing, every muscle on alert.

Except it’s not a deer. It’s a girl in a white dress, a wide apron, her light hair braided and wrapped around her head. Madge Undersee, he realizes after a stupid moment. Her face. That’s why he didn’t recognize her. Her mouth and jaw are smutted with purplish gore, pulp streaking from her sticky fingers when she notices him and gives a little cry. Her hand is full of what he thinks at first could be berries. Summer grapes, actually.

“Gale? Gale Hawthorne? Is that you?” she asks, frightened, looking at him like she’s never seen him before.

“Shhh,” he hisses. “Keep making that much noise, I won’t be the only one. What the h- what are you doing out here?”

Madge crosses her arms, banging a basket against her hip. “I’m fine,” she says defensively.

“Yeah.” He keeps his tone deliberately hostile. “You would have been really fine if I had my bow, and had decided to shoot before looking. Or if you ran into a lynx, or maybe a bear. I can tell how fine you’d be.”

“I came to find some berries for my dad. There hasn’t been anyone to bring them.”

“’S a dumb reason to risk coming out here.”

“You do.” She runs her fingers over the fruit she’s already collected. “Katniss did. Why am I so different?”

There’s at least ten competing answers to that question – you have no skills; you don’t need to; you are just a dumb town girl; you aren’t one of us, don’t even pretend – but Gale doesn’t feel the need to actually voice any of them. Maybe it’s Madge’s defiant expression. Maybe it’s his own whole sense of not giving a shit about anything, since his best friend is gone and it feels like there’s no order left in a world where people are normally choking on all of it.

“Those are sour,” he tells her instead. “Make you sick if you eat too much.”

“I haven’t had grapes in years,” she says conversationally. “Once, when I was little, my dad hosted one of President Snow’s ambassadors. I don’t know what he was doing here, but my parents went crazy making sure he’d be impressed. My mom sold a pair of earrings that she’d worn when she got married, you know, bought all this food I’d never eaten before. Roast chicken for dinner, new potatoes, fresh greens. Lots of fruit for after. There were grapes and strawberries. I ate until I felt sick, and I dreamed about them for days.”

It’s the longest he’s ever heard her talk, her words hushed like a foreign language made up all of whispers. He notices a posy of dried flowers pinned to her belt – lavender. Good for repelling stinging insects, he remembers vaguely, and almost bursts out into inappropriate laughter. Trust the mayor’s daughter to think that bees were what she needed to worry about.

He reaches out, pulls at her arm. “Come on. Let me walk you back. You've got no business out here. I know where there are some decent blackberries this time of year. I’ll bring some ‘round to your father later.”

Madge doesn’t budge, but she doesn’t pull her arm loose, either. “Have you been watching the Games?” she asks. “I mean, Katniss? She killed those Career girls. With the tracker jackers…”

“I know. I saw it.” His reply is terse. Of course he’d fucking seen it. It was the biggest story of the nightly round-up when it happened; maybe the biggest of the Games so far, minus the opening slaughter. There are people, real sick types, who are glued to the 24/7 streaming feeds of the action as it unfolds, taking advantage of the ‘round-the-clock electricity, but most citizens don’t have the time or stomach to watch the tributes hiding in thickets for hours on end, or preparing their meals, or sleeping. The evening recap of the day’s activities, on the other hand, is required viewing, which means that Hazelle compels Gale to sit in front of the TV for half an hour at ten every night. (He tries hard to focus on the wall beyond; anything besides the screen. He can’t close his ears as easily, however.) He remembers that moment well, the pride and revulsion he’d felt when the wasps got Glimmer.

“At least she got her bow and arrow. That will give her the best chance, I guess.”

He suddenly wants to strike her, anger writhing under his skin. But Gale never has and never would hit a girl. His hands stick out in front of him, stiff and hard because he’s seriously thinking he’s going to shake her for being so clueless, so privileged, so infuriating in her pretty Reaping-day dress and her shoes without holes in them. Her shoulders, however, are soft and warm under their little puffed sleeves. Madge doesn’t flinch, like he’d think she would. She just looks up at him, quiet and still. Waiting. Grape juice is drying on her chin.

Gale’s never been out here with anyone but Katniss, so it’s easy to pretend. He tilts Madge’s face up to meet his, fruit-stickiness dirtying his hand when it brushes her jaw. She tastes so sweet that there’s no her underneath it, no girl flavor to give away who she’s not. With his eyes closed, her hair isn’t all wrong. She isn’t a bit too tall, too slight, too yielding when he opens her mouth with his tongue and her whole body sags into his. It’s almost like he’d pictured it, the way he always thought it would be because of course there would be enough time.

He backs her into a tree, a little aggressively, just to see if she’ll scare off. She doesn’t.

Afterward, he’s unsure when kissing her became touching her, his hands running up and down her bare arms. He touches her face, her neck, her sharp collarbones. He smoothes his hand over the front of the nice dress that Katniss would never wear, feeling a leaping heart under the small breasts, and a line of buttons down the front.

At some point, Madge starts touching him back. Untucking his shirt, dipping her fingers into his navel and just inside his waistband. Her hands climb his chest. The summer heat loosens their bodies, making their mouths slack on one another. Deep in Gale’s stomach, a knotted tangle of heat unfurls itself like a clinging vine. He bunches the skirt in his fists, pulling her hips up tight against his. There’s a haze of blotchy red behind his eyes, the echo of sunlight, and it flares brilliantly when she cups his erection through his pants.

He’s gotten off on this fantasy so many times, alone in his room after his siblings and mother have gone to sleep, that it doesn’t seem strange at first. Katniss. She’d be a virgin for sure, and maybe a little nervous, but she’d crack a joke and get his clothes off with the same single-minded determination that characterized her every move. It would be like them hunting together, natural and effortless, but a million times sexier – Katniss naked on a bed of summer leaves; all that olive skin. Her dark hair tangled in his hands, her body arching upwards like the curve of her father’s bow.

Madge grins at him, lopsided and shy, and gets down on her knees to unfasten his pants. There’s something so submissive in her posture, the way she touches him, that the illusion shatters.

Her mouth is soft and hot, sucking him inexpertly in a way that still manages to make him feel like his whole body is itching just under the skin.

“You don’t have to-“ he starts, choking on the protest.

She mumbles something that could have been yes or hush, or just the churn of her lips wrapped around him.

It doesn’t take long at all. There’s a fireball of colors in his head, jumbled and indistinct voices licking at his brain when she pulls off him and he gets his hand down just in time to come messily all over it. The breath he’s been holding shudders and shakes out of him like it was yanked out with a fishhook. His heart beats fast and too hard.

“That was my first time doing that,” she confesses, her voice a little rougher than before. It simultaneously fascinates and embarrasses him.

He wipes his fingers against the tree bark, and then on his pants to finish. “You, uh, did a good job.”

“Thank you.” There’s a high, red color to her cheeks. She’s normally pale, like a girl who spends more time at school and in her nice house than climbing fences and poaching in the woods. Or, for that matter, looking awkwardly at boys who aren’t spellbound by her pretty face. He pulls her in for another kiss, sloppier this time, and her hands grab at his waist greedily, like claws.

He unties her apron, hangs it on a tree limb. Her dress comes up in a cloud. There’s a lot of white stuff underneath, stiff fabric with no substance that seems to be there only to make the skirt fuller.

Gale eases his thumbs inside the waist of her sensible cotton underwear, feeling so clumsy that he figures it must show, marveling at how Madge doesn’t seem to care. He’s kissed plenty of girls, fumbled a little on weekend nights in the trees behind the Hob, but nothing like this. There’s a tuft of light hair between her legs, hair that crinkles under his palm when he curves his fingers against her. She’s as wet and syrupy as one of the grapes, coating his fingers as she hisses out a low oh.

“You ever had this done for you?” His voice breaks, though it’s barely above a whisper.

“N-not by anyone else,” she tells his, licking her lips. “I’ve – myself, you know. Not with anyone.”

It’s a startlingly frank confession, and Gale likes her better for it, even through his mild shock. He’s learning all sorts of things that he never knew about Madge Undersee, never especially wanted to know, personal disclosures seeping from her like the juice of a ripe berry. Her eyes roll under her pale lashes.

Funny thing is, if they got caught right now, the Peacekeepers would most likely roll their eyes. It’s so very typical; teenagers sneaking away to couple in the woods. So normal on a brilliantly hot day when there’s no school and everyone is lulled into complacency by another year of having been not picked to fight to the death. With the soft puff of Madge’s skirt against his stomach and his free arm wedged in the dry grass, Gale has never felt such a trespass. He’s never taken a girl to the woods. Not to do this, even if he maybe dared sometimes to think one day. (It feels like a betrayal, and that makes him angry. Katniss has Peeta now. He owes her nothing.)

“Lay back,” he tells Madge, learning by touch and sound what works best.

He can’t be sure whether it’s really her, or just a break in the shade from the branches overhead, but it’s like Madge burns up when she falls apart. Her spine stiffens, her fingers clench at the long strands of grass, and a wave of heat rolls off her. Her hair is coming undone, fine tendrils escaping the braids and sticking to her sweaty face. Inside her mouth, he can just see the pink of her tongue, the blueish tint to her canines.

It takes her a moment to find her voice, licking her lips to moisten them. Madge lolls her head to the side, hikes her skirt up high on her thighs.

“You – we can, if you want,” she says hesitantly. “I’ve never, you know. But I’d like it to be you, if you wanted to.”

Oh God, he thinks. He just did that (all of it) with someone who doesn’t realize that maybe it wouldn’t be possible for him to do that again so soon. Someone with that degree of naïveté, which shouldn’t really surprise him but still makes him feel sick again. “Another time,” he says. Thinking (meaning) never. “Um. Thank you. Anyway.”

Madge sits up, smoothing her slip over her knees as she shucks her fine dress in the morning heat. The glance he catches from her is measured. She scrubs at her mouth with the back of her hand, and rolls her bare shoulders.

“Ever since I could remember, I’ve always wondered what it was like to be her,” she says, out of nowhere. (Gale doesn’t need to ask who.) “She was always so brave, you know. So fearless. Then she volunteered for her sister at the Reaping, and I thought – that will never be me. I’m not that special."

It’s on the tip of his tongue to make a mean remark about exactly how special it is to be picked for certain, painful, lonely death and the slaughter of your peers, but he bites it back. For some reason he doesn’t understand, he gets what Madge said. The girl on fire. How many times has he watched her tiny image on his family’s TV, staring until the pixels blurred and he couldn’t tell whether he felt sick from the strain, or from what he was looking at?

Madge stands up, and dusts the hem of her slip. Her apron is still hanging on the tree. She retrieves it, standing on tiptoe, and drops it over her head. With the laces tied behind her back, she could be just one of the Seam girls, the coal miners’ daughters, wearing a skimpy summer dress because there wasn’t enough fabric.

“Your dress,” Gale says.

Madge toes on her shoes, wincing at a bramble stuck in the heel of one. “I don’t want to see it again,” she tells him.

“Won’t your parents wonder what happened to it?”

“They’ll be mad, yeah.” Gale can’t conceive of such waste, of discarding a sturdy piece of clothing just because it makes you feel something you don’t like. It’s foreign to him. “I’ll tell them something – I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

She lets him walk her back, pulling back the broken area in the fence so she can slip through. He leaves her at the edge of the district square, feeling awkward at being seen with her in a public space. Not that it matters, really. At ten in the morning, most of the merchants haven’t yet opened their doors, and the miners are sleeping in on their single day off. There’s a smudge of dirt on her forehead; he wonders if he should let her know. A goodbye, an apology, an explanation all ferment in his mouth, but nothing comes out. Madge doesn’t seem to expect anything. At the invisible line between her territory and his, she pats his arm and walks away without looking back.

_

 

The following Sunday comes around, slow as watching the sun move across the sky. Katniss lives, fights, falls madly in love with Peeta. So she says, anyway. Gale has his doubts, but then again, he’s not sure. He doesn’t know what to feel anymore. Hearing Katniss sing Rue a Seam lullaby as she died, watching her kill Marvel, holding his breath as she walked into the obvious trap of the Feast to get medicine for that damn blond baker boy – there’s something heavy in his chest, but it’s locked up tight. He can’t be positive what’s in there.

The day is just starting, as hot as the last. There’s clouds in the distance, at least. Maybe rain is coming.

Madge’s dress is still where he left it, bundled in a dug-out hole under a big rock. Carefully, Gale shakes it out and surveys the damage in the shadowy light of morning. It’s smudged all over with dirt, the faded bloom of purplish stains in the folds of the skirt. He rubs the hem between his fingers, absently calculating what he could get for such a dainty thing at the Hob. He’d have to be careful, of course, since (unlike strawberries and the odd lynx pelt) fancy girls’ dresses are a rarity of particular note. Even in the black market. Still. Even a reduced price for someone who could be discreet would feed his family for over a month.

Long enough to almost wait out the summer. Long enough for the Games to be over. Long enough for Katniss. There are only five tributes left. Surely, these days can’t drag on for much longer. (Madge’s posy is crushed, but still pinned at the waist.)

Gale folds the dress over and over into a tight parcel, and stuffs it under his shirt, where the strap of his game sack will hold it securely in place. Decides that he’ll send the money to Haymitch, buy a sponsorship for Katniss. As he hunts, he thinks of how he could possibly help her, how one little parachute down from her sky will have come from him – even if she can’t possibly know that. The dress wilts in the heat, drooping against his skin. Every so often, the faintest waft of earth, girl, and sweetness hits his face, and he has to close his eyes against the hurt that smacks his chest as swiftly and surely as an arrow.  
_


End file.
